It has been building, for the last decade, around the NBA—the use of a new breed of advanced numbers-crunching, known as analytics and employed by increasingly tech-savvy front offices seeking an edge in their evaluation of offseason roster construction and in-season roster manipulation.

Along the way, though, the use of analytics has made many an old-school coaches nervous, afraid that the same kind of tech boom that caused a restructuring in scouting and coaching circles in baseball would do the same in the NBA.

It was an issue in mid-September, at the NBA’s coaches retreat in Los Angeles and at the annual coaches meeting in Chicago that followed, and the issue was familiar to anyone who followed the push-and-pull between the old and new schools in baseball—instincts vs. evidence.

“I understand it makes some people nervous,” Bucks coach Larry Drew said. “It has been a really big topic in the last year or two. I know it was a big topic at the NBA head coaches’ meeting this fall. Personally, I am for it. … Some coaches are not.

"You’ve got some guys who are kind of old-school guys who have done it a certain way, by feel. Certainly, you have to go a lot on feel, as far as coaching is concerned.”

In the NBA, the line between a coach’s instinct and feel, and what the cold numbers say is one that differs from organization to organization, and in a league that saw 13 coaching changes this summer—including nine first-time head coaches being awarded jobs—the haziness of that line can be discomforting.

One veteran head coach, who asked for anonymity, said of this year’s coaches meetings: “There were guys who were just plain p***** off about it. Because what is happening is, I have to know what makes a guy tick, I have to know when one of my players can’t stand the other guy, I have to know when I can get on his a**.

"There are no numbers that are going to tell us that. When someone comes in and tells you that you ought to be listening to the numbers and letting that tell you how to coach, no one is going to be happy about that. But you have to be afraid they will just go and get somebody cheaper and tell him to follow the numbers.”

Most coaches acknowledge that advanced stats can be useful if handled the right way. There are now multiple websites that break down what players do both offensively and defensively, and can tell coaches how efficient a player is at very specific plays—running the pick-and-roll as a ballhandler, defending spot-up shooters, going to his left shoulder in the lower left block, and so on.

Jeff Van Gundy was coach of the Rockets for a year when Daryl Morey—whom Van Gundy called, “the Godfather of NBA analytics”—was the team’s general manager. Van Gundy said that Morey was adept at balancing numbers against the desire of a coach to run things his own way.

“Morey realized, I think, that there was some art to the job of coaching and it wasn’t just a number-based approach,” said Van Gundy, who is now an ESPN NBA analyst. “But I found the numbers that he presented to make you really self-evaluate.

"Let’s say they brought up a scenario, and the numbers said you should obviously do something, and your philosophy was something else. It made you sit there and analyze why you believed what you believed. I think that's good. Now whether you changed your philosophy or not, that’s really secondary. But it did make you think.”

The crossroads between analytics and coaching are not always so smooth, though, Van Gundy pointed out. “I think the one danger is when management people feel they know more about coaching than coaches who have done this for a long time,” Van Gundy said. “There is a difference between helpful suggestions and overbearing pushing of an agenda.”

That is, in part, what happened last season with the Grizzlies, who replaced coach Lionel Hollins with assistant Dave Joerger. Hollins, of course, had done the job for the Grizzlies for the past five years, and won 56 games last year. But as the front office made more of a move toward the use of analytics, even hiring well-respected ESPN numbers guru John Hollinger to serve as vice president of basketball operations, Hollins chafed.

Hollins reportedly had a confrontation with Hollinger during a practice in last year’s playoffs, and had been vocally opposed to the Grizzlies’ trade of Rudy Gay as well as the front office’s push to have newly acquired forward Ed Davis play more.

Doug Collins, a veteran coach of 11 years who agreed to leave the Sixers last year as the team headed into a rebuilding mode, suggested that instances like Hollins in Memphis or even himself in Philadelphia actually go all the way to the top, to the new breed of young owners in the league and how they made their money.

Four of the five most recent new owners made their money either in technology (Sacramento’s Vivek Ranadive, Memphis’ Robert Pera) or private equity (Philadelphia’s Joshua Harris, Detroit’s Tom Gores). Those are numbers-based industries.

“A lot of the new ownership, it’s hedge fund managers and guys who are very, very involved now with their teams,” said Collins, an analyst on ESPN's NBA Countdown. “A lot of these guys, it may be hard for them to talk personnel in certain ways, but the one thing that they can talk is numbers. …

"I am big on analytics being a huge part of it, teams are smart to use analytics, but at the same time, to me, there is the eye test, there is the heart test, there is that test every single day when you are with players in practice, developing a trust and a truth with one another about how you want to win basketball games. It is in flux right now, but the beauty is, let’s see how it all turns out.”

Collins pointed out an example. “I was reading,” he said, “where a general manager was watching and a guy took a 3, missed it and said, ‘Boy, that’s a great shot,’ and then a guy came down and hit a 2 and he said, ‘That’s a bad shot.’ The one that went in was a bad shot? Well, that’s tough to coach in a circumstance like that, when you are going to be gauged on every shot.”

That is the kind of thing that can cause rifts within a team—the sense that the coach wants to use players in one way but the front office wants something altogether different. That can trickle down to players. Again, for the Rockets, where Morey has been a pioneer of advanced stats and current coach, Kevin McHale, remains an old-school guy, the separation has been a key.

“You hear about them using stuff like that and all of that,” said Houston point guard Patrick Beverley. “But for us as players, we don’t deal with that. It does not affect us, because in this locker room, we are all just basketball players, and we go out and try to do what we do as best as we can. Coach isn’t up there giving us a bunch of numbers. We just go out and play.”

That’s the ideal, at least. Another veteran—former Nuggets head coach George Karl—knows it does not always go that smoothly.

“Front office people and analytic people all have got to work with the coaching staff to find a togetherness, a unity, a harmony that you’re together with it,” Karl said. “When you bring negative energy to your organization because of a conflict or a confrontation or a disagreement, and you make that known to the locker room, you make it known to the players in that locker room, you are disserving the organization, the coaching staff and the team. ...

"We can’t use it as a negative force. If you use it as a negative force to point fingers and put some blame and shame into the locker room, into the organization, it is very, very dangerous.”

That, going forward, will the conundrum for coaches. There is an unquestioned usefulness about advanced stats. But as many coaches see it, they have the potential to be very, very dangerous.